The Migration Already Happened

September 1 was not a warning. Google's AI Max auto-upgrade window ran September 1 through September 30, and any Search campaign still using Campaign-level Broad Match or legacy Automatically Created Assets got migrated in place. No opt-out existed. The legacy settings are gone.

If your account showed a migration notice and you ignored it, the settings were applied on Google's schedule, not yours. Campaign IDs stayed intact. What changed was the operating logic underneath them.

What AI Max Actually Changed in Your Account

Three things shifted on the campaigns that were upgraded.

Search term matching replaced campaign-level broad match. Where you previously controlled query expansion through keyword match types, AI Max now expands to queries Google's model considers relevant. That pool is materially larger than old-school broad match ever reached.

Automatically Created Assets became text customization. The system can now rewrite your headlines and descriptions by pulling from your landing page content and your existing ads. Your brand voice is filtered through whatever signals Google pulls off the page.

Brand controls carried over automatically. Inclusions and exclusions migrated, which matters because brand controls are now your primary lever for limiting where the expansion goes. Confirm them. Do not assume the transfer was clean.

The Performance Claim and the Gap

Google says AI Max delivers 7% more conversions at a similar CPA compared to search term matching alone. That figure comes from aggregate 2026 data, excludes retail accounts, and measures performance with the full feature suite active.

Independent testing tells a different story in specific verticals. One analysis across more than 250 retail campaigns recorded a 35% lower ROAS compared to traditional match types. A separate study found 99% of AI Max impressions across a 30,000 search term sample produced zero conversions. Neither number is wrong. Google measures aggregate improvement on accounts with sufficient data volume and clean conversion tracking. The independent data measures accounts where expanded query pools mean more spend on lower-intent traffic.

Your outcome sits somewhere between those two points. Where it lands depends on your tracking hygiene, your negative keyword structure, and how well your landing pages match actual searcher intent.

What This Means for Brand Strategy in Paid Search

Google now generates your headlines if the system decides your landing page offers better material than your existing copy. That is not a small thing. It is the difference between ad copy your team reviewed and approved, and ad copy assembled from whatever language happens to live on your page.

Clean landing pages were always important. They are now the direct creative input to an automated system running your account. Thin pages, vague value propositions, and cluttered calls to action give AI Max poor material to work with. The system still generates something. It just might not sound like your brand.

Negative keyword lists matter more now, not less. AI Max expands matching aggressively. Weak negatives turn into real spend on queries that look plausible but carry no commercial intent. If your negative lists have not been reviewed since before August 3, look at them today.

The brand controls layer is the one concrete lever you retained. Exclusions migrated automatically but should be confirmed, not assumed. Treat them as the primary guardrail they now are.

One Technical Item for Anyone Running External Dashboards

AI Max introduces new reporting segments that can silently break landing-page joins in third-party BI tools. The new segments.search_term_match_source field splits traffic into three buckets: advertiser-provided keywords, AI Max broad match expansions, and keywordless matches driven entirely from page and asset content. If your reporting pipeline was built on legacy Google Ads field structures, the join can fail without an error.

Pull your first two weeks of October data before assuming September performance held steady. The campaign IDs survived the migration. The data model underneath them did not always survive intact.

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